SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 164

ing, Pennsylvania, and Joseph from Southern California. I had noticed them at the lodge
because they looked and acted as if they had been hitchhiking across Africa and the lodge
was their first taste of the good life in quite some time. I was wrong about the hitchhiking
part.
“I was working in the Copperbelt for the last two years,” said Renee. “I never saw wild-
life. It was a different country than this.”
The young men agreed and said, “Man, a different country.”
Adam, who helped farmers install ponds and raise fish, said he had seen only one mon-
key in his two years in Zambia. “One of my farmers saw the monkey first. He shot it right
there and killed it and ate it. They eat everything. I ate it with him.”
The three pulled out their bird guidebooks and pointed to a red bishop in a tree. Mostly
they were silent, drinking in an Africa they said was foreign to everything they had known
in Zambia.
• • •
The Honorable Catherine Namugala, minister of tourism of Zambia, opened the confer-
ence with a regal bearing, a commanding voice and a broad smile. The late-morning audi-
ence was alight with young women in bright textile skirts and young men in white shirts
attending the 5th International Institute for Peace Through Tourism Africa Conference.
We were 440 delegates from 36 countries as well as Zambian students and guests invited
to discuss tourism and climate change. The conference center at Lusaka's Intercontinent-
al Hotel was full.
“Welcome,” said Namugala, and she introduced Rupiah Banda, the president of Zam-
bia. Everyone stood as the large man walked to the podium.
It wouldn't be an understatement to say that Lusaka, Zambia, is rarely host to inter-
national tourism conferences or trade shows. The first city that comes to mind is Berlin,
the host of the gold-standard ITB International Tourism Bourse, the leading tourism trade
show in the world. Singapore hosts the Asian version. In the United States, New York and
Las Vegas are meccas for tourism conferences and shows.
Lusaka isn't even on the B-list of tourist conventions. So this conference was a welcome
moment in the tourist spotlight for Zambian officials, who were determined to make the
most of it. President Banda gave the proceedings a Zambian flavor by first welcoming tri-
bal chiefs in the audience—before the foreign ambassadors, members of Parliament and
assorted dignitaries—and expanding on an earlier comment to take a poke at an issue of
tribal rivalry that set the crowd laughing. “We are all cousins,” he explained to us visitors.
Then the president switched to his text and the thrust of his speech. He hoped, he
said, that the conference would showcase Zambia's tourism and investment opportunities.
Zambia's economy is one of the fastest-growing in the world thanks to tourism and miner-